Meggie is a 12-year-old girl.  Mo is her father.  In the Inkheart series of books, they show an amazing ability to read aloud a passage from a novel and draw a character from the page into the room they’re in. 

Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone

Words that came to her tongue so easily and with such power when she read aloud

And now Meggie wants to go the other way … into the worlds described in her beloved books.

Cornelia Funke has created a magical universe, full of wondrous people.  And I love what Meggie and Mo have to say and think:

Go on, admit it, the book whispers its story to you at night  (Mo)

I’d like to bring them out of books, touch them, all those characters, all those wonderful characters.  I want them to come out of the pages and sit beside me, I want them to smile at me, I want, I want, I want …  (Meggie)

Taste every word, Meggie … savour it on your tongue.  Do you taste the colours?  Do you taste the wind and the night?  The fear and the joy?  And the love.  Taste them, Meggie, and everything will come to life  (Mo)

…

She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio.  She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes.  So Meggie decided that words would be her trade

And where better could she learn that trade than in a house full of magical creatures, where fairies built their nests in the garden and books whispered on the shelves by night?  As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic too

…

She always did like tales of adventure – stories full of brightness and darkness … Your mother loved a book to lead her into an unknown land  (Mo)

She herself had already opened doors, had lured living, breathing creatures out of faded, yellowing pages  (Meggie)

She wanted to see everything that Dustfinger and her mother had told her about, Dustfinger in a voice soft with longing: the fairies swarming above the grass, trees so high that you thought they would catch the clouds in their branches, the Wayless Wood, the strolling players, the Laughing Prince’s castle, the silver towers of the Castle of Night, Ombra market, the fire that danced for him, the whispering pool where the water-nymphs’ faces looked up at you …

To think of the magic he could have worked in her room with his voice, a voice that gave a different flavour to every word, made every sentence a melody!

The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages

Her curiosity was too much for her.  She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door.  They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before

Those books were full of the most wonderful words about love and kindness and mercy

***

Et voilà!

Meggie and Mo

The wonders revealed on the printed page